The Setting of the Sun King

by LOUIS KRONENBERGER

THE reign, the court life, the personal and inviolable majesty of Louis XIV have attracted biographers in every age, and been steadily in demand among readers. This is not hard to account for: in addition to being the lengthiest of reigns, Louis’s was the most resplendent; was the most scandalous as well as ceremonious of courts; and Louis himself was the grandest mannered as well as the most terrifying of monarchs. No other king, again, has had three ladies around the house who to this day are household names; nor presided over so many splendid establishments, from the Louvre, which he avoided, to the Versailles which he adored; and none either, that I know of, had so many famous writersand artists-in-residence, whether as composers or historiographers or dramatists or diarists or chaplains or gardeners or tutors.

And now Nancy Mitford, whose writing has nicely mingled real French people — Voltaire, Madame de Pompadour—with fictional English ones, has paused to celebrate Louis, and turned back to his fabulous and rather monstrous world in The Sun King. Her book is not a from-the-cradleto-the-grave biography, since it really begins with the King, in his early twenties, assuming absolute power at Mazarin’s death; nor does it open a very wide window on history, since it deals hardly at all with Louis’s place in the Europe of his time, and very little more with his actual governing of France. The book is firmly centered in that most renowned of Louis’s creations, Versailles; it begins, indeed, with his impulse to “create” it, and Versailles becomes not simply the scene of most of The Sun King, but very often its principal subject matter. It is court life that Miss Mitford perambulates, social history that she proffers — which is to say, palace duplicity in the very obvious sense of the word, palace domesticity in the not everywhere wholesome sense, palace promiscuity in the form of locked doors and lurking figures, not to mention matters of genealogy, precedence, protocol, to which it is hard to say whether Louis XIV or Miss Mitford attaches the greater importance. All this involves, of course, one of the most extraordinary casts of characters available in a single setting and period; and all this, on its own terms, is abundant sustenance enough and sauce piquante enough for a great feast of high life, swimming in anecdote about small disasters on great occasions, and flowing with gossip about the worst side of the Best People.

At a court of such magnitude it is a memory test to keep track of who’s who, let alone of their grandmothers; and of vast help as well as genuine delight are the book’s fine illustrations, many of them in superb color. These support Miss Mitford’s own eye for scene and gifts of language, alternating close-ups with panoramas, grandees with gardens, period atmosphere with personal detail. With so long a reign to traverse and so large a company to keep in touch with, the fixedness of Versailles—which includes the many years it was building — proves a narrative blessing. To be sure, Louis, in addition to his military tours, was off on occasion to Marly or Meudon or Fontainebleau, though almost never to Paris, which he shunned; but these were excursions, progresses, whims of his, and it is Versailles that comes to mean home. Its being home links The Sun King with another recent and rewarding book, At the Court of Versailles (edited by Gilette Ziegler), the text annotating passages from the letters and memoirs of various observers of our fifty-year-long scene.

There is only one commanding actor of this scene: the King, despite monotonous quirks and magnificent competition, dwarfs everyone else. And in the end, there can be only one historian of it, much drawn upon here: the Due de SaintSimon, who, though prejudiced, long-winded, and a latecomer, is as essential to Louis and Versailles as is Boswell to Johnson (and who is also as peculiar a genius). But there is not just one Versailles. I count at least three: one a very grand spectacle: another, full of weird figures and sideshows; a third, all backstage grime and stealth.

We all know the glittering storybook Versailles: the stately ceremonial, the polished comedy of manners, the coroneted chronique scandaleuse. This is the Versailles of Miss Milford’s best pages and of almost all the book’s illustrations. In it the King promenades and gives ear to courtiers; the King dines, alone but observed by multitudes; the King hunts: it is a diversion he loves. There are tournaments, garden parties, supper parties, masked balls, musicales. At the Court of Versailles records a grand week-long entertainment. By day, knights tide at full gallop, lance in hand, to unhook and carry off rings hanging from a stake; in the brilliantly lighted dusk, Lully advances at the head of a vast troupe marching in time with his new music; simultaneously, moving down a different avenue emerge The Four Seasons — Spring on a great Spanish horse, Summer on an elephant, Autumn on a camel, Winter on a bear. Latter that week comes the famous première (and, for some time, dernière) of Tartuffe. So life proceeds, with an elaborate protocol governing every great, and almost every routine, occasion. People were shown civilities based on rank — those greeted or au-revoired at the Door, those offered an Armchair, those worthy of being seen off in their Coach. There were customs, too, that began with ladies arriving in their coach and in due course passing through a door; whether an armchair came next is less certain. Such incidents are the commonplaces of Versailles and of a hundred historical novels; the attendant or subsequent scandals gave Versailles its small talk and made of it a whispering gallery. In all such presentations of The King and I, the star of Act I was Mademoiselle de La Valliere; of Act II, Madame de Montespan; of Act III, Madame de Maintenon. Much protocol, much geste obtained even here: so long as his Queen lived, the King always slept in her bed.

Contributing to the splendors of Versailles, but receiving little attention in The Sun King, were the artists Louis XIV patronized and domiciled, and their achievements in art. Just how much Louis cared for art, as distinguished from magnificent effects, is doubtful (though he genuinely liked music and plays). But he knew the worth of talent, and his Versailles boasts a blazing constellation of names. Molière and Racine helped write its plays, Bossuet preached its sermons, La Bruyère and Fénelon tutored its sons, Lully composed its music, Mansart was its architect, Le Nôtre its gardener. Nor was Saint-Simon its only distinguished chronicler: Madame de Sévigné and Madame de la Fayette were others. The paintings displayed at Versailles, by Giorgione, Mantegna, Raphael. Veronese, Poussin, and Rubens, now hang in the Louvre. And all this great spectacle was conducted on an unprecedentedly great scale: there “lived” at the palace some fifteen thousand people —standing, squatting, kneeling, bowing, bending forward, walking backward, but very seldom seated, in the presence of the King,

THERE is a second Versailles, where Old Masters give way to caricature, eulogy turns to jest, breeding to inbreeding, and noble personages appear as “characters.” There is considerable petty malice here and considerable reason for it; and here, with his flair for gossip and eye for the grotesque, SaintSimon is invaluable, though others contribute also. A puritan duke personally smashes all the “indecent” statues he inherits from a cardinal. A great lady, asked whether she recites the Lord’s Prayer, says yes, all but the forgiving trespasses. As the King’s brother expires, his widow shrieks at the top of her lungs: “No convent for me! Don’t you talk to me about convents! I won’t go to a convent!” Wives, for a joke, have other ladies impersonate them in bed; in deadly earnest, a madly ambitious courtier lies all night under the bed of Madame de Montespan and the King to find out what they think of him.

But such anecdotes cannot fully convey what an opulent madhouse or human menagerie Versailles could be. It is less at anecdote than at portraiture that Saint-Simon excels, whether from among the living personages or from among the living freaks and monsters who enter and exit, re-enter and reexit over thousands of pages. There is just space to sample Saint-Simon’s obituary of the exalted Prince de Condé. No man, we are told, had more ability, or when he chose, was more discerning, noble, graceful. But none could be odder. He had four dinners waiting for him every day in four different houses. Once, entering the Maréchale de Noailles’s bedroom as her bed was being made, he cried out, “Oh, the nice pretty bed, the nice pretty bed!", leapt upon it, rolled over and over in it, and climbed down apologizing that it was so clean and inviting, what else could he do? At one period, he thought he was a dog, and during the King’s going-to-bed ceremonies, threw his head in the air and opened his mouth wide, imitating one. Late in life, he refused to eat, announcing that he was dead and that the dead do not eat. Fearing that if he didn’t eat he would die, his doctors agreed that he was dead but insisted that the dead did sometimes eat, and produced a few such. The trick worked, but M. le Prince would eat only with these dead men and his doctor.

Yet, more perhaps than Louis’s Versailles was ceremonial grandeur or idiot farce, it was something of a nightmare or a horror story. Under the jewels and furs and velvets might be found bodies hideous with sores; after the great dinners and suppers came ghastly paroxysms of pain; in the midst of life there was everywhere the specter of death. None of this is symbolic; it was actual, true. Even wearing a mask under a mask wasn’t symbolic; it was a season’s doubtless very useful vogue. There were genuine drawbacks to being highborn and rich. If, with 498 people attending the King’s dinner table, or 1500 jets of water playing at Versailles, there was a good deal of Hollywood about it all, there was perhaps even more of hell. What it nowadays means to be sick, at Versailles was deemed good health. Everyone, from a gluttonous King down, regularly took gargantuan purges; whom one dined with might be spreading smallpox, whom one danced with might be wasted with cancer. In an age of fiendishly misguided medical theory, the rich, able to afford slews of doctors and doomed to die of their prescriptions, could be worse off than the poor. Almost every ailment meant constant bloodletting; almost any mishap could end in blood poisoning.

The King, moreover, who insisted that the Court attend him at Versailles, and was a past master at taking attendance, also insisted that women he liked attend him on his travels; and they, whether big with child or burning with fever, had to sit with him in his coach, could never nap, never refuse food, never relieve themselves, never droop — “to feel sick,” wrote Saint-Simon, “was an unforgivable sin.” Hence even the one person Louis adored, his grandson’s wife the Duchesse de Bourgogne, could be jogged into a miscarriage. She, moreover, along with three successive heirs to the throne — her father-in-law, her husband, and her son — died within eleven months of smallpox, measles, doctoring; and her younger son, but for his governess hiding him from the doctors, might never have lived to be Louix XV.

But hell at Versailles was not just a gruesome infirmary. Mischief, slander, conspiracy abounded. Poisoning was virtually the rage, from poudres à heritage, “medicine” to dispose of unwanted rich relations, to hospitality, from which magnificoes might die in agony, and for which great ladies were burned at the stake. But the very air was poisoned, with espionage, treachery, debauchery. Versailles boasted a whole titled homosexual society, with, right in the palace, princes “scurrying through the night.” When Madame de Maintenon remonstrated with the King, he answered: “Am I to begin then with my own brother?” Even paying the King homage was a hazard. Louis, when young, attended an entertainment in his honor which proved so presumptuously grand that Louis’s breadand-butter letter was a lettre de cachet, locking up his host “perpetually” in a fortress. And Louis, when old, resentful of military disasters, remorseful for various misdeeds, and all too aware that the night cometh, could be more than ever, more harshly, more unaccountably, autocratic.

LOUIS the man is perhaps not too difficult to grasp, being, if monumentally large, relatively one dimensional. He was every inch, and in his every thought, a king, making of divine right a superb, often rather diabolical, role, and making hubris in other men seem like downright humility. He had a gimlet eye, a medieval mind, a Bourbon’s memory; his rebukes could annihilate, his condescensions sometimes enchant. With matters spiritual he was not always at one. He thought that Christ’s language should have been more upper class; and after a great military defeat, he said: “God seems to have forgotten all I have done for Him.” War gave Louis a blazing noon — at forty he was lord of all Europe. It gave him equally a bloody sunset— a France exhausted and distressed. Women gave him lifelong pleasure and were his greatest weakness, whether from their being able to tempt or to manage him. His subjects’ welfare gave him small concern: he refused to hear about millions of wretches who froze, or starved, or died like flies carrying out his vast building schemes. Late in life he made three extremely costly mistakes. He revoked the Edict of Nantes, which drove half a million (many of them notable) Protestants into exile; he helped set his grandson on the throne of Spain, which, threatening the balance of power, beclouded any hopes of peace; and at the exiled James II’s death, he recognized his son as James III of England, which let slip the dogs of war.

In viewing le roi soleil, Miss Mitford at times wears sunglasses, at other times rose-colored ones. She notes most of his failings, but glides — or, more accurately, hurries — over them, since it is the Grand Monarque, the master of Versailles, the company he keeps, the ladies he smiles on, the nobles he snubs, the festivities he graces, that attract and inspirit her. All this side of things Miss Mitford handles with decided vivacity, and much of the royal couch, chaise percée, and arsenic-in-thesoup side, too. Her book is wonderfully readable. But though the grandeurs it celebrates do not dim her wit, they let her sense of humor doze, and flatten out her sense of style. The royal misfortunes induce servant-girl-literature clichés. “One hopes,” writes Miss Mitford, “that the King found comfort [in his new chapel] in the trials that lay ahead”; or “The events of February 1712 are almost too heartrending to relate.” On the other hand, the misfortunes of the King’s subjects draw from Miss Mitford such dinner-party adjectives as “horrid” and “dreadful,” which are perhaps the only licensed upper-class words for referring to unspeakable torture or mass starvation. And, to Miss Mitford, Louis’s story offers no fresher moral, if it offers that, than vanitas vanitatum, and no more stringent morality than when and with whom to be polite. She pronounces for Louis XIV as “perhaps the most truly polite king who ever lived.” But contradictory evidence on his part aside, on this subject Miss Mitford is perhaps not altogether trustworthy, in view of that memorable Edict of Nancy some years ago, that the only possible response to any non-U phrase, such as a friendly “It was so nice meeting you,” is total silence. Whether or not supremely polite, Louis could show kingly control as when, to keep from thrashing a courtier he was furious with, he flung his cane out of the window.

On the seamy side there is more material in At the Court of Versailles than in The Sun King, along with additional sidelights and details. But much derives from our great chronicler who for twentyodd years shadowed the Sun King, and as it is with Saint-Simon that any writer on Louis and Versailles begins, so I think must any fully life-size account of them end. Not in Saint-Simon either do we get political history, but we do get the vast methodology of a whole society and way of life; here, indeed, one after another of La Rochefoucauld’s worldly maxims turn to flesh and blood, breathe and whisper and walk about. No wonder Proust pored endlessly over Saint-Simon (finding in him, for that matter, such names as Mirepoix and Charlus). And Saint-Simon is more than a tireless chronicler; he has a great novelist’s power of portrayal, and his blind spots, however many, fall far short of his perceptions. His name is ineffaceably stamped on the crowded scene he portrays; and his Memoirs, though of staggering length, will richly repay a little dipping into, say a couple of hundred pages in one place, and a couple of hundred more in another.